When Paul Thomas Anderson set out to write what would become his third feature, Magnolia, he had one actor in mind for the role of dying patriarch Earl Partridge: Jason Robards. When he was initially offered the part, Robards passed, due to a staph infection. But the stars realigned after George C. Scott turned Anderson down. “It was sort of prophetic that I be asked to play a guy going out in life,” Robards said at the time. “It was just so right for me to do this and bring what I know to it.” He was certainly correct in one sense: like his character, Robards, born one hundred years ago this week, would succumb to lung cancer within a year of the film’s release at age 78. It would be his final screen appearance, but it’s notable not only in how it pointed forward but in the ways it called back to the many iconic performances of his long career, particularly in a film that’s routinely cited as a major influence on Anderson’s work: Jonathan Demme’s Melvin and Howard.
The logline has the sort of “print the legend” quality that American stories excel at: one night in 1967, a good-natured fuckup named Melvin Dummar (played by Paul Le Mat) pulls over on a desolate stretch of highway to piss and notices a disheveled man lying on the side of U.S. Route 95. He doesn’t look like a billionaire, with hair like Einstein stuck his finger in an electrical socket and blood coming out of his left ear, but that’s exactly what he’ll claim to be. After the man refuses medical attention, Melvin agrees to drive him to Las Vegas, wearing down his belligerent exterior until he’s goaded the old man into singing along to his original yuletide composition “Santa’s Souped-Up Sleigh.” Nine years and three marriages to two wives later, Melvin finds himself named a beneficiary to the Howard Hughes estate. It’s all billed as being “possibly true.”
What’s most remarkable about Melvin and Howard is what it isn’t: a film about Hughes. Once Melvin drops Hughes off (and gives him a quarter when he asks for money), he disappears entirely from the film, which opts instead to follow the slings and arrows of Melvin’s (mis)fortunes through the sort of seedy strip clubs, trailer parks, and factory floors that are far from any milieu Hughes would recognize. Nor is Demme especially interested in interrogating the truth of Melvin’s story once the so-called “Morman Will,” which deeded him $156 million of the Hughes fortune, surfaces. Instead it takes Melvin at his word, just as he does when Hughes reveals his identity to him on that fateful night.
Viewers in 1980 must have been slightly mystified by this sideways approach to such a vaunted figure of recent American history. Hughes was one of our first great billionaire eccentrics, years before Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerburg made that a more dubious proposition. He was also a mercurial and difficult person, becoming a recluse in his later years as he struggled with mental illness and deteriorating physical health. Both Martin Scorsese and Warren Beatty spent decades developing projects on Hughes’s life, eventually realizing them to varying degrees of success. But what Demme in his film and Robards in his performance intuitively understand is that “Howard Hughes”, much like the country that made him, was an entity created by committee, whose story changes depending on who’s telling it. Whatever true self he possessed was inaccessible by design.
Robards had plenty of experience playing famous Americans during the span of his fifty-two years on stage and screen, including three presidents, Mark Twain, and, in the one-two punch that won him successive Best Supporting Actor Oscars, Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee in 1976’s All the President’s Men and Dashiell Hammett in 1977’s Julia. He wasn’t exactly in his twilight years when he played Hughes, but he effectively embodies the crusty carapace of a man whose best times are behind him, if they ever truly existed in the first place. Demme gets plenty of comedic mileage out of simply holding the camera on Robards’s face as he makes minute adjustments to Hughes’s thousand yard stare, at once amused and appalled by his unlikely savior, sometimes crafty and sometimes cruel as he tests Melvin’s boundaries.
Hughes was a man who only truly seemed comfortable with himself when in motion, and Robards conveys this as well. The most touching scene in the film comes at the end, when Melvin has given up any pretense of actually getting the money and is driving back down the same road he did a decade before. He remembers a moment not depicted earlier, when Hughes badgered Melvin into letting him drive his truck. Extending Hughes the same goodwill that he’s accepted from him, Melvin drifts to sleep while Hughes is at the wheel, a look of pure unfettered joy in the old man’s eyes. The end credits roll as Robards warbles his way through “Bye Bye Blackbird.”
It’s surely this simultaneous capacity for prickliness and humanity that Paul Thomas Anderson had in mind when he created Earl Partridge, who has amassed a Hughes-like wealth but been rendered immobile by his illness. Robards’s second act-ending monologue probably contains more lines than the entirety of his role in Melvin and Howard, but the counsel Partridge offers could have been as easily directed at Melvin as the aide at his bedside: “Use that regret for anything, any way you want… Life ain’t short, it’s long.” Soon after, Robards will join the rest of Magnolia’s cast in a rendition of Aimee Mann’s “Wise Up.” To be able to tie up a career in such a neat bow is a mixed blessing, in some ways. He probably knew the end was coming. But as both Earl and Howard demonstrate, if given the chance, it’s best to go out singing. 
